Amazon’s cutting-edge delivery drones fell from the sky during a December test flight after a software update made them vulnerable to rain — an avoidable disaster made worse by the company’s decision to remove a critical safety sensor, according to a report citing federal documents.
The twin crashes of Amazon’s MK30 drones in Oregon occurred just minutes apart on Dec. 16, when both aircraft abruptly shut off mid-air at an altitude of more than 200 feet and slammed into the ground, Bloomberg News reported.
The autonomous drones incorrectly believed they had landed, triggering an automatic shutdown of their propellers while flying, according to the report.
An investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board blamed the cause on faulty lidar readings made worse by the rain and a software tweak that increased the sensors’ sensitivity, Bloomberg reported.
The NTSB told The Post that the drones “erroneously determined they had touched down due to an incorrect altitude reading from a new software installation, which resulted in a loss of engine power.”
In a potentially crucial misstep, Amazon had removed backup “squat switches” — metal prongs used in earlier models to physically confirm a landing — leaving the aircraft reliant solely on sensor input, according to Bloomberg.
The absence of this fail-safe likely contributed to the crashes, three people briefed on the matter told Bloomberg.
Amazon strongly pushed back on those claims.
“Bloomberg’s reporting is misleading,” spokesperson Kate Kudrna told The Post.
“Statements that assume that replacing one system with another would have prevented an accident in the past is irresponsible.”
Kudrna said Amazon has incorporated “multiple sensor inputs” to prevent false readings from causing future crashes.
She added that the MK30 drone is both safer and more reliable than its predecessor and complies with Federal Aviation Administration standards.
The crashes mark another hurdle for Amazon’s decade-long effort to launch a scalable drone delivery operation.
First unveiled by then-CEO Jeff Bezos in 2013, the drone initiative was billed as a technological leap that would enable packages to be delivered in under 30 minutes.
Bezos predicted at the time that drones would be dropping packages within five years. That promise has yet to materialize.
Amazon’s drone project has been hampered by repeated delays, technical glitches and regulatory challenges.
A 2021 crash at its Pendleton, Ore., test site sparked a fire. The December accidents led to a temporary pause in drone testing.
Last year, the mayor of College Station, Texas, a town located around 100 miles northwest of Houston, wrote a letter to the FAA complaining that Amazon’s drones were making too much noise.
Amazon resumed flight operations in March after receiving FAA approval for updated altitude-sensing systems.
The MK30 drone, which replaced the earlier MK27 model, can fly up to 67 miles per hour and deliver packages within a 7.5-mile radius.
While the MK27 relied on a combination of lidar and squat switches to confirm landings, the MK30 depends solely on camera-based computer vision and software redundancy to make that determination.
Critics say the shift away from physical fail-safes reflects a broader industry trend toward streamlining hardware in favor of software solutions, often to cut weight and production costs.
The MK30, for example, no longer lands in backyards like its predecessor.
Instead, it hovers and drops packages from about 13 feet up — an operational change that reduces the risk of human contact with its now more-exposed propellers.
Deliveries remain limited to College Station and the greater Phoenix area, with planned expansions to Kansas City, the Dallas area, San Antonio and international markets like the UK and Italy.
Despite these milestones, the program is still far from Bezos’s original vision of a drone-powered logistics revolution.
